Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

You think that the mental anguish you are experiencing is a permanent condition, but for the vast majority of people it is only a temporary state.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.

Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

If you have not known suffering, love me.

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

Choose from among the girls who live near you and check every detail, so that your bride will not be the neighborhood joke. Nothing is better for man than a good wife, and no horror matches a bad one.

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.

After you left for work, I would stare at the door as if it might open again.

There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.

It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth. But you could, if you were wrong and if you had a crooked heart, forget this most obvious and endearing thing and instead speak of a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love. You could say that was your happiest time. And if you did this then telling about this happiest of times would cause the person you most want to be happy to be unhappy.

Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind.

I was hoping your happiest memory might include me.

But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.